Today, August 2, the planet enters an ecological deficit. It is Earth Excess Day, a day that underlines the date when humanity runs out of the renewable natural resources it can produce in a year. Thus, today humanity exhausts the budget it has to take advantage of these resources without mortgaging the ability of ecosystems to regenerate. From now on, overexploitation will be at the expense of depleting natural capital and increasing the ecological debt. It is the demonstration that we consume more natural resources than the planet is capable of renewing.
The celebration of this August 2 is the result of the original counter of the organization Global Footprint Network, which has placed this calculation in the calendar to visualize the growing debt with the planet, with the aim of helping the economies to act within the limits of the planet.
The calculator takes into account the ecological footprint (the demand for resources) and the regeneration capacity of ecosystems (biocapacity), a division from which the number that can be placed on the calendar is extracted.
Almost every year, as a general rule, the date when this ecological balance is exceeded has been pushed forward, although the pressure on resources decreased in the financial crises of 2007 or during the pandemic, which has made on this date.
This year, since new information has been incorporated on the 180 monitored countries, it is concluded that the date of the excess has been delayed by five days compared to 2022 (then it was July 28). The delay is therefore due to a methodological correction, while the real and effective improvement would be a single day.
However, the behavior is not the same in all countries. Germany and France exhausted their ecological resources on May 4 and 5. And other countries, even, before: Qatar, on February 10; Luxembourg on February 14, and Canada, the US or the United Arab Emirates on March 13. Spain entered an ecological deficit on May 12. The ecological footprint (resources consumed) has been estimated at 2.8 global hectares per capita, which is the estimated area needed to cover resource demands (food, forest resources, pasture, fish and urbanization and infrastructure), including – there is the forest space necessary to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions. In the case of Spain, it is four global hectares per capita.